I am a cognitive and socioecological scientist who investigates how people and places continually shape one another. My work spans multiple scales — from the developmental onset of identity to the large-scale cultural patterns predicted by geography and mobility.
During my doctoral research at The New School for Social Research, I introduced the concept of placefulness — the degree to which people’s sense of self is tied to specific environments — along with a harmonic-mean metric of residential stability that complements existing measures of mobility. These frameworks open new ways of understanding how stability and movement through space leave lasting psychological traces.
My approach is socioecological: I examine how terrain, mobility, and infrastructures channel human behavior and cultural life. Projects include cross-national studies linking rugged terrain to hierarchy endorsement, urban analyses of parking orientation as a proxy for community time horizons, and experiments on helping behavior and memory shaped by residential stability.
This reflects my guiding principle: outside shapes inside. Environments don’t merely surround us — they participate in making us who we are. Through international collaborations, I extend this lens to show how variations in frictions and affordances of unlock creativity, adaptation, and resilience.
Feel free and I encourage you to connect.